(OSV News) -- Pro-life campaigners have urged Britain's Catholic bishops to speak out against pressure for abortions.

This comes after thousands of women were wrongly counseled to end their pregnancies based on a misdiagnosis of prenatal test results, prompting the largest maternity review in the history of the National Health Service, or NHS.

"These stories are heartbreaking -- not just because of their gravity, but because we're still not learning necessary lessons about the intrinsic nature of life," said Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, co-director of March for Life U.K.

"The church must accept its own part in this terrible situation, in which clergy and lay faithful have failed to speak up -- through fear, discomfort or ignorance," she said.

The lay Catholic spoke with OSV News as new fines were imposed on NHS hospitals in Nottingham for needless baby deaths and as an inquiry into their "maternity failings" was extended because of the huge number of families affected.

A local pro-life activist said he and his wife were pressured to accept having an abortion after their unborn child was mistakenly diagnosed during prenatal tests as having a disability. He added that "deficiencies in caring for babies" was predictable in hospitals where unborn children were routinely aborted, sometimes up to birth.

"As a society, we've got ourselves into a terrible mess over whether we value life or treat it as a commodity," said John Edwards, pro-life coordinator for the Diocese of Nottingham.

"The idea that such woefully inadequate care of new-born children is occurring only here in Nottingham is nonsense -- it's been picked up on here, but it's clearly replicated across the country," he said. "Leadership matters, and if priests and bishops said this was wrong, it would make a difference."

The independent inquiry into maternity services at Nottingham's City Hospital and Queen's Medical Center was launched in July 2022 under midwife director Donna Ockenden, after claims that hundreds of babies had been injured or died through negligence.

A separate police investigation has been underway since September 2023 alongside the inquiry, which on Feb. 1 was extended to June 2026 to cover complaints from over 2,000 families.

Abuses were highlighted in 2021, when medical staffers Jack and Sarah Hawkins were awarded a record 2.8 million pounds ($3.53 million) for stillbirth negligence, after being falsely told their unborn daughter had died of an infection. In April 2016, Sarah was in labor for six days before Harriet was stillborn, almost nine hours after dying.

In the latest ruling, supervisors at the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust were fined 1.6 million pounds ($2.02 million) Feb. 12 for failing to provide safe care, staff training and "adequate communication systems."

Asked for a reaction to the Ockenden inquiry, the largest in the state-run NHS's history, a spokesperson for the Catholic bishops' conference of England and Wales, who asked not to be named, told OSV News it was a concern for the local Nottingham Diocese.

However, a diocesan spokesman said Bishop Patrick McKinney had a "very busy schedule" and was unable to comment.

Meanwhile, the diocese's official hospital chaplain, Father Slawomir Hermanowicz, told OSV News he was on sick leave and "completely unaware" of any problems.

However, a local Catholic mother, Naomi Archer-Roberts, told OSV News many women feared giving birth at Nottingham hospitals because of the "gut-wrenching stories," but faced "practicalities and risks" traveling to other "poorly rated maternity services." "As a Catholic family, we've willingly committed ourselves to never considering abortion -- but it's still extremely scary and upsetting to think we could have been in that position," Archer-Roberts said.

"For each couple, these moments are once-in-a-lifetime, even if they go on to have more children. Every life is precious, unique and valuable, and every family should receive top-quality care."

The chief executive of Britain's Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, John Deighan, told OSV News the "significant and shocking failures" detailed by the Ockenden inquiry had exposed "the most callous attitudes towards unborn life."

"That women were pressured to have abortions on the basis of tests which wrongly predicted genetic conditions in their unborn child highlights the brutal reality and heartless frequency with which abortion is used," the Glasgow-based Catholic said.

"It also betrays a deadly attitude towards the disabled in the womb, when it should never be the case that a disability diagnosis is used as a death sentence."

Meanwhile, Edwards said he and his wife had refused further prenatal tests after being told their child had "a pretty good chance of being born disabled."

He added that his son, born with no medical problems, now held a professional job after graduating from a top university.

"As practicing Catholics, we understood and accepted the church's teaching that all life is sacred -- but parents without clear religious beliefs, who aren't sure about the value of life and often not notified of the support available, can easily be frightened into accepting advice from a medical professional that having a child with a disability is a disaster, which it isn't," the pro-life coordinator told OSV News.

"Such pressure is insidious and widespread in a country where it's legal to have an abortion up to birth on grounds of serious disability -- and where serious disability includes conditions such as a cleft palate or club foot, which can be fixed with a couple of operations and aren't even seen as disabilities in a decent society."

Although abortion remains technically illegal in Britain under an 1861 Offenses Against the Person Act, this was amended in 1967 to waive criminal sanctions for abortions up to 28 weeks -- a deadline lowered in 1991 to 24 weeks, still twice the European average.

A record 251,377 abortions, almost all NHS-funded, were conducted in England and Wales in 2022, a 17% increase over the previous years. After cases where women were prosecuted for illegal abortions, new demands for total decriminalization were lodged in January by over 30 organizations, including the British Medical Association and British Society of Abortion Care Providers.

In his OSV News interview, Edwards said pro-life Christians had started a pregnancy support center in a Nottingham church, also organizing a annual "40 Days for Life" prayer campaign, a movement that originated in the U.S., despite "strong opposition" from hospital directors.

He added that Nottingham's Bishop McKinney had supported pro-life causes, but said other church leaders had remained quiet on abortion to "avoid confrontation or offense."

Lacking "coherent moral leadership," most British Catholics have accepted the status quo, the pro-life coordinator said, in a "climate of active censorship dominated by liberal, anti-Christian voices," in which the value of life has been "deeply and deliberately undermined."

Meanwhile, Vaughan-Spruce -- to whom police in England apologized six months after she was arrested in March 2023 for praying silently outside an abortion facility -- said Britain's abortion law had enshrined a principle "that the worth of a pre-born child is contingent on their mother's feelings," adding that the latest scandals reflected a "relativistic value system" fostered in Britain for decades.

"When we brand the intentional killing of preborn children as health care, we shouldn't be surprised that this lack of basic humanity seeps into our whole medical system," the March for Life director told OSV News.

"There's an opportunity here for the church to be a beacon of hope for those whose lives have been shattered, as well as for those needing courage to confront their own failings with humility," Vaughan-Spruce said. "But the church must also remember that truth is paramount -- it shouldn't be a false compassion that fails to help people accept responsibility."

The Queen's Medical Center gained international attention in November 2023 for removing life support from an 8-month-old baby, Indi Gregory, despite offers of specialized treatment from the Italian government.

- - - Jonathan Luxmoore writes for OSV News from Oxford, England.